d Bibbienas, and
Aretines, came forward on his stage of planks at Padua, and after
describing the ruin and wretchedness of the country, the sense of
dreariness and desolation, which made young folk careless of marriage,
and the very nightingales (he thought) careless of song, recommended his
audience, since they could not even cry thoroughly and to feel any the
better for it, to laugh, if they still were able. Boiardo was forgotten;
his spirit was unsuited to the depression, gloomy brutality, gloomy
sentimentality, which grew every day as Italy settled down after its
Renaissance-Shrovetide in the cinders and fasting of the long Lent of
Spanish and Jesuit rule.

Still the style of Boiardo was not yet exhausted; the peculiar kind of
fairy epic, the peculiar combination of chivalric and classic elements
of which the "Orlando Innamorato" and the "Orlando Furioso," had been
the great examples, still fascinated poets and public. The Renaissance,
or what remained of it, was now no longer confined to Italy; it had
spread, paler, more diluted, shallower, over the rest of Europe. To
follow the filiation of schools, to understand the intellectual
relationships of individuals, of the latter half of the sixteenth
century, it becomes necessary to move from one country to another. And
thus the two brother poets of the family of Boiardo, its two last and
much saddened representatives, came to write in very different languages
and under very different circumstances. These two are Tasso and our own
Spenser. They are both poets of the school of the "Orlando Innamorato,"
both poets of a reaction, of a kind of purified Renaissance: the one of
the late Italian Renaissance emasculated by the Council of Trent and by
Spain; the other of the English Renaissance, in its youth truly, but, in
the individual case of Spenser, timidly drawn aside from the excesses of
buoyant life around. In the days of the semi-atheist dramatists, all
flesh and blood and democracy, Spenser steeps himself in Christianity
and chivalry, even as Tasso does, following on the fleshly levity and
scepticism of Boiardo, Berni, and Ariosto. There is in both poets a
paleness, a certain diaphanous weakness, an absence of strong tint or
fibre or perfume; in Tasso the pallor of autumn, in Spenser the paleness
of spring: autumn left sad and leafless by the too voluptuous heat and
fruitfulness of summer; spring still pale and pinched by winter, with
timid nipped grass and unripe stif